Feature image: From left: Phillip Andrew Lewis and Lenka Clayton—photo courtesy of the artists.
Submitted
Sheboygan, WI – Opening January 31, 2026, at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC), Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis: Rock Fade (~45 Billion Years) is a large-scale installation by artist-collaborators Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis. Inviting viewers into an encounter with deep geological time, human perception, and our impulse to order the natural world, the work consists of a carefully selected sequence of stones arranged in a perfect line, gradually diminishing in size. This deceptively simple gesture becomes a profound meditation on material, meaning, and scale, prompting visitors to consider how aesthetic experience is shaped not only by material form, but also by embodied perception and collective engagement.
“Rock Fade takes something deeply familiar, a stone, and asks us to encounter it in a new light. As the sequence shifts from boulder to sand, the work reveals how perception, movement, and shared experience shape what we understand as art,” states Jodi Throckmorton, Chief Curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. “Relocating the installation across phases challenges us to reflect on our own role in ordering, witnessing, and ultimately returning these materials to the world.”
On view through August 16, Rock Fade (~45 Billion Years) references local and global rituals of marking time and space with stones, through collection, spirituality, and boundary setting. The work engages a deep human tradition to collect, order, control, and define the natural world against the backdrop of the slow transformation of rocks across ancient seas, volcanic flows, and glacial drifts; always in motion, even in their stillness. This juxtaposition highlights the tension between the human impulse to order and the inevitable processes of erosion and transformation that characterize geological time, revealing the work’s core inquiry: that the act of arranging the stones is both fleeting and monumental. Over time, the artwork will erode, scatter, and reintegrate with the earth, resulting not in failure, but in fulfillment.
Rock Fade (~45 Billion Years) builds on the conceptual framework of an earlier gesture of stone placement found in the artist environment of pioneer fiber artist Lenore G. Tawney (1907-2007) at JMKAC’s Art Preserve, in which Tawney arranged a subtle gradient of rocks from large to small. The work becomes a form of intergenerational dialogue—artists speaking to one another across time not by replicating but by amplifying, through matter, order, and attention. Clayton and Lewis will be Lenore G. Tawney Fellows at JMKAC in 2026, a fellowship that fosters new engagement with Tawney’s art environment, made possible with support from the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation. Candidates are encouraged to apply with projects that study overlooked aspects of works and movements related to Tawney or discuss previously unexplored connections between those works and art from other disciplines.
“Rock Fade engages with the tradition of artist-built environments and the Arts Center’s work to preserve them while embracing the processes that shape them, offering a rare opportunity to witness an artwork that lives, changes, and integrates back into the environment over time. We’re proud to collaborate with Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis as this project unfolds with our community,” adds Amy Horst, Executive Director of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
Rock Fade is designed to shift the audience’s relationship to material, scale, and time as it unfolds through multiple phases starting with the exhibition at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (January 31-August 16, 2026). The linear installation in a white-cube space depicts the stones removed from their natural setting, placed in a controlled environment that invites close-looking and contemplation.
On September 19, 2026, a community procession will follow, inviting participants of all ages and ability to help transport the stones from the gallery to an outdoor site. The procession is logistical and symbolic: an act of communal labor, care, and transformation that becomes a form of glaciation and procession through movement, merging geologic time with collective human effort. The procession will conclude at the Art Preserve where Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis will utilize the rocks for a long-term outdoor installation. The procession will be documented in a film to extend its impact and reach.
For its final phase, Rock Fade will come to rest where, for years to come, environmental forces will erode and reshape the installation. Visitors will encounter the work embedded in the land, part as sculpture, part as earthwork, with accessibility top of mind to ensure a wide range of bodies are able to experience the piece.
The project, through all the stages, reminds visitors to slow down, notice matter, and share responsibility for how they move through time and space, particularly potent during a global moment of political and climate crisis and shortened attention spans.
About Lenka Clayton
Lenka Clayton is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers, exaggerates, and alters the accepted rules of everyday life, extending the familiar into the realms of the poetic and absurd. Clayton is the founder of An Artist Residency in Motherhood, a self-directed, open-source artist residency program that takes place inside the homes and lives of artists who are also parents.
Recent exhibitions include Rising Sun (2023) at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Day Jobs (2023) at the Blanton Museum of Art, The Museum Collects Itself (2023) at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, and To Begin Again (2022) at ICA Boston. Clayton’s work has been supported by The Warhol Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts. She has received an Art Matters Award, a Carol R. Brown Award for Creative Achievement, and a Creative Development Grant from Heinz/Pittsburgh Foundation. She has been an artist-in-residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, PA and Headlands Center for the Arts, CA and was a Sabrina Merage Fellow with Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum.
Clayton’s work is held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, SFMoMA in California, Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in Massachusetts, and The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and The Philadelphia Art Museum in Pennsylvania. Permanent public artworks include Darkhouse Lighthouse, and Historic Site, both made with collaborator Phillip Andrew Lewis.
About Phillip Andrew Lewis
Phillip Andrew Lewis is a Philadelphia-based artist who works in a variety of media including photography, video, objects, and sound. His creative research often responds to historical events, psychology, and phenomenology. This work consistently examines duration, perceptual limits, and attentive observation. Lewis is actively involved in collaboration with artists and various groups. Phillip has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally. He received a 2012 Creative Capital Grant in Visual Art for his ongoing long-term project entitled SYNONYM. He has also received generous support for his research from Black Cube, Headlands Center for the Arts, Culture and Animals Foundation, Center for Creative Photography, Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York, Fathomers, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Midway Contemporary Arts Fund, Tennessee Arts Commission, University of Tennessee, UrbanArt Commission, The Heinz Endowments, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and Sabrina Merage Foundation. In collaboration with his wife, Lenka Clayton, he runs a project space in Pittsburgh called Gallery Closed, which is open 24/7 via two street-facing windows.
About the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Founded in 1967, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) is a nonprofit creative hub dedicated to presenting and preserving the work of contemporary artists through original exhibitions, commissions, residencies, community arts programming, and publications. The only institution in the world that collects artist-built and artist home-based environments, JMKAC is a leading center for research and presentation of self-taught and folk artists, preserving and championing work that cannot be found anywhere else. Spanning two facilities that are free and open to the public, the Arts Center and the Art Preserve, JMKAC’s campus includes eight galleries, two performance spaces, and 56,000 square feet of curated, visible collections storage. JMKAC’s wide range of programming responds to community needs and fosters both global idea exchange as well as lifelong engagement with the arts, including an onsite preschool; free classes and events; and its flagship Arts/Industry residency program, a partnership with Kohler Co. that provides artists with resources and studio space at the Kohler factory. For more information, visit jmkac.org.
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